Supremacy at Sea: Task Force 58 and the Central Pacific Victory

Having read many articles, books and the biographies of King, Nimitz and Spruance on the subject I found this book a great unbiased review of the the actions during this period with excellent detail. It has also inspired me to research further of the events in the Pacific including the involvement of the Royal Navy towards the end of the Pacific War. The British aircraft carriers had a major benefit of the armoured deck over the American carriers which enabled them to continue action even when hit by kamikaze.

This got rather bogged down in model type numbers and history prior to what happened and skipped over much of the core battles. It felt like a history of the US navy rather than the battles themselves. I still enjoyed it for that though. Also the editing - I mean so many poorly constructed sentences and words that should have just been removed, never mind the misuse of ‘there’ at times. If you paid for an editor I’d get your money back Mr Mawdsley!

This is a completely comprehensive account but sadly lapses into listing everything and lacks readability. This would make a good reference book.

book for those people interested in task force 58 the largest armada ever to put to sea.

Really enjoyable read...in one day. Could not put it down.

Concur with David’s Review.. You had better read Buell, Potter, Morison & Toll to understand this book.

Good book. This book is not a war adventure story but a telling of the different factors that came together to produce the dominant American carrier fleet in 1944. Also Japanese weakness that added to their essential weakness.

Very detailed and thorough but too much so for me. After reading authors such as Hornfischer and Toll it was much too dry.

Well researched and documented, but adds nothing to other recent Pacific War books. A lot of documentation and command structure that would appeal to Navy historians but not to the average reader

This detailed story of the most powerful naval force in history is exhaustive and exhausting. I can picture the author with his detailed research notes deciding to include every single piece of it. The book is at least 50% too long because it includes such minutiae as the names of every fleet oiler and when it was constructed, pilots' names, repetitive narration of fleet procedures, and departures from the book's topic: submarines, battles elsewhere, and "what ifs." It's as if you're driving a high performance car but only concerned with the dials and buttons. Worse, for someone supposedly an expert on the US Navy, the author (who is a professor in Glasgow), makes errors. There is no "Congressional Medal of Honor" in the US. It's the Medal of Honor, which everyone familiar with the military knows. I found that this book's difficulty in slogging through it far outweighed the benefits from reading it.